Skeptics Guide #991

The Skeptic’s Guide to the Universe Skepticast #991 July 3rd 2024 Segment #1. Quickie with Bob Simulating Black Holes https://phys.org/news/2024-07-cosmic-simulation-reveals-black-holes.html Segment #2. News Items News Item #1 – DNA Nano-Killbot https://theness.com/neurologicablog/dna-nanorobot-kill-switch-for-cancer/ News Item #2 – Bionic Leg https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/01/health/bionic-leg-ami-neuroprosthesis/index.html News Item #3 – Neanderthal with Downs https://neurosciencenews.com/neandertal-down-syndrome-care-26382/ https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/51000-year-old-indonesian-cave-painting-may-be-the-worlds-oldest-storytelling-art News Item #4 – Festival Fail https://loudwire.com/capulet-fest-2024-third-day-canceled/ News Item #5 – Kugelblitz Black Holes https://www.sciencenews.org/article/black-hole-light-quantum-physics Segment #3. Who’s That Noisy Segment #4. Name That Logical Fallacy Is there is a term for a pattern of behavior from religious individuals, they seem to divorce themselves for the responsibility of convincing others and instead make it a problem within the audience, if your heart wasn't hardened the proof would be evident. I even see this in texts, the parable of Lazarus has someone asking Abraham for help convincing his family to believe and he gets rejected. Randy Segment #5. Science or Fiction Each week our host will come up with three science news items or facts, two genuine, one fictitious. He will challenge our panel of skeptics to sniff out the fake – and you can play along. Item 1: In a sample of almost 10 thousand people, smoking was found to correlate with lower personality scores in Conscientiousness and Agreeableness and higher Extraversion scores. Item 2: Researchers find that the standard pasteurization process eliminates 100% of H5N1 bird flu virus from infected milk. Item 3: A new study finds that introns (non-coding segments of genes) can affect protein folding, independent of their effects on splicing. Segment #6. Skeptical Quote of the Week "Rarely do the advocates of cleanses explain what is meant by toxins. It is one of those nebulous pseudoscientific terms rolled out by people deliberately avoiding the specificity required for a science-based analysis. It’s the modern-day equivalent of “evil spirits,” vague enough to mean just about anything while retaining the ring of scientific legitimacy.” ― Timothy Caulfield, Is Gwyneth Paltrow Wrong About Everything?: How the Famous Sell Us Elixirs of Health, Beauty & Happiness


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